A year ago the YouTube channel MegaLag uploaded an exposé of the popular browser extension "Honey", which was acquired at some point by the giant megacorporation PayPal. Some people had already raised concerns about the extension years prior, and some big-name YouTube channels even stopped accepting their sponsorship deals because of their dubious practices. But that exposé video went really viral, has (as of writing this) 18 million views, and caused a huge controversy and even lawsuits against PayPal.
Turns out that what was exposed in that original video wasn't even the worst part. In fact, those things are peanuts compared to what the extension is actually doing and how it works, as revealed by the second part of the exposé, which MegaLag uploaded recently.
There are something like dozen individual things that the extension and the company running it are doing that's either outright illegal, or at a very minimum extremely questionable. Most of those things are quite bad (such as stealing commissions, ie. money, from YouTube channels without even their knowledge), but one of those things really angered me:
Suppose that you are a relatively small American business that is moderately successful, hanging by with decent sales. Your business has a dozen or two American war veterans as clients. Sometimes when such a veteran comes to the shop, the employees will say: "Thank you for your service. Here, have this coupon code that will give you a 20% discount on your next purchase."
Said veteran then is one day browsing the store's online shop, buys something, and enters the coupon code to get the discount.
However, turns out that either he, or perhaps a family member, had installed the Honey extension to his web browser. Turns out that said extension surreptitiously, without asking for any kind of permission or giving any kind of notification, takes that coupon code (which the shop intended exclusively for war veterans) and sends it to Honey's web servers, which then proceed to distribute it to everybody who buys something from that shop.
And, thus, this shop that wanted to be patriotic and show appreciation for their veterans by giving them this nice gesture of good faith, and expecting maybe a couple of such discounted purchases from a dozen veterans, have suddenly found themselves getting thousands and thousands of purchases with that very discount applied, with them having no idea where they are coming from.
Several shop owners, interviewed in the second video, report monetary losses of up to hundreds of thousands of dollars, because of this scheme, and only because they distributed coupon codes intended for a smell group of people. (And, indeed, this is not even "lost revenue". This is actual literal loss of money because the discount codes mean that they are selling the product for less revenue than the shop purchased it for. In other words, the shop paid more money for the products than they are receiving from the customers buying it, which is not merely a loss of revenue, but a pure loss of money.)
The Honey extension is literally stealing coupon codes, surreptitiously behind the scenes, and distributing it to thousands and even millions of users, without the knowledge and permission of the businesses in question.
PayPal's excuse? Well, "the businesses can always opt out." Yeah, quite literally they are saying that businesses can "opt out" from their coupon codes being stolen without their knowledge or permission.
And, as the video points out, even that "opt-out" system doesn't necessarily work.
The only option that these shops have is to stop issuing discount coupon codes because there's no other way to stop Honey from stealing them. Thus, they cannot do this kind of community service to the people in their community that would most benefit from it.
It's actually amazing how scummy PayPal is being with this.
Comments
Post a Comment